Wars (hot and cold) never simply start. Just as Cold War 1 really began in 1917, but then broke out fully in 1945, the early warning signs of Cold War 2.0 appeared many years before Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and China’s aggression in the South China Sea around the same time. Putin actually began his descent into autocracy right after he was elected president in 2000. Post-Mao China actually started to bare its autocratic fangs when numerous Beijing leadership hard-liners overruled many fewer reformers and ordered the army to murder several hundred unarmed student political protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. A keen observer of these events would have realized in an instant that international cold war behavior was going to follow closely on the heels of these internal stains of autocracy.
In 2012 Xi Jinping further confirmed China’s break with the democracies when he declared that China has no interest in pursuing democracy practices, extolling instead the Chinese one-party system led by the glorious Chinese Communist Party. Xi also proceeded to implement the most draconian citizen surveillance/oppression technology on earth, and began to export it to seventy countries. Xi spent huge sums on the largest military buildup program in history, while chronically underfunding the Chinese healthcare system. He also waged economic coercion against half a dozen democracies. Intellectual property theft, such a critical plank in the Cold War 1 playbook, came back in vogue for China and Russia; they both updated their electronic skill sets so they can launch large numbers of cyberattacks against the democracies. The action turned physical when in 2014 Russia annexed Crimea and sent irregular soldiers into Ukraine’s Donbas region. China used a range of armed ships to make a play for ownership of 90 percent of the South China Sea, thumbing its nose with impunity at the sputtering democracies. Cold War 2.0 had begun.
The year 1989 was the critical pivot point between Cold War 1 and the eventual Cold War 2.0. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became supreme leader of Russia’s Communist Party (RCP) and effectively the autocrat of Russia. His record ultimately proved to be very different from his predecessors, largely because he instituted two groundbreaking reforms. Most importantly, Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost opened up political freedoms, including in respect to speech, assembly, and eventually, in 1989, Russia’s first relatively fair and free elections to Soviet Russia’s first elected legislative assembly, called the Duma. Gorbachev’s second reform was perestroika, which was a policy that began to restructure the economy. It was not full-on privatization, but definitely the start of a move away from the top-down command and control system of economic planning where government decides what the economy would produce and what the prices for everything would be. By 1989 the momentum caused by glasnost and perestroika had grassroots movements in the East Bloc countries, especially Poland, planning their own multiparty elections, which for forty years had been outlawed in the Soviet Empire.
In China at this time these same winds of change and reform were blowing. By 1989 China had a decade of experience with a version of perestroika, Chinese-style, as Deng gradually opened up the Chinese economy. In China, however, there had not been any official policy equivalent to glasnost. Nonetheless, there were a number of student leaders—and even some senior members of the Chinese Communist Party—starting to talk openly about the need for some political reforms. In the spring of 1989 about 8,000 students were camped out in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, peacefully calling for some political freedoms. This was an unprecedented development in China. Many of the students in Tiananmen Square pointed to the political liberalizing trends in Russia and the East Bloc, and asked for the same rights in China. The world waited in anticipation for Deng’s response.
On June 3, 1989, Deng gave a loud and unequivocal answer. He ordered army tanks and armored personnel carriers into Tiananmen Square to clear out the protesters. The army used violence on a grand scale.1 Conservative estimates put the number of dead protesters at 800 and the wounded at 10,000. By this military operation against his own people, Deng made Beijing’s position very clear regarding Gorbachev’s reform efforts—yes to market liberalization (perestroika), but a firm no to political freedom (glasnost). Even market liberalization, though, has become in China a “top-down” exercise directed at all times by the CCP. The CCP is firmly in control of the general direction in which private companies can develop, thereby making sure that entrepreneurs never stray from the “correct path” as articulated by the CCP.
After the Tiananmen Square massacre most democracies refused to give up on the objective that over time, if only China were integrated more fully into the global trading system of the democracies, its political rough edges would smooth out and would one day become politically liberal like the democracies. Fueled by this hope, the democracies permitted China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001, even though many practices in its domestic economy disqualified it (i.e., a number of domains in China were closed for foreign investment). Apologists for China in the democracies argued that by extending the olive branch to China, the democracies would be handsomely repaid by China eventually changing its most problematic political and economic practices. They argued that “peace would follow economic integration,” a theory long proposed by leading political thinkers in the democracies. More cynical businesspeople argued that regardless of the state of personal civil rights in China, there were billions of dollars to be made in trading and otherwise doing business with the country.
In the first decade after China joined the WTO there did sprout some “green shoots” of a thaw in Beijing. Measured criticism of the regime was being permitted. The infamous censors eased up somewhat on books, magazines, and other written materials. Chinese human rights campaigners even saw small signs of progress. These early efforts at a glasnost lite, though, came to an abrupt halt in 2012, when Xi Jinping became the paramount leader of China. Xi terminated the political loosening, and in fact under his stern gaze China turned ever more autocratic. For example, he undermined term limits for his position and has essentially solidified his status as “leader-for life.”
Deng abhorred Mao’s excesses like the Cultural Revolution. Deng wanted to ensure that never again could the leader of the country become as powerful as Mao. Deng instituted two checks and balances on the role of paramount leader (the head of the CCP). First, Deng made the Politburo Standing Committee into an important deliberative organ with meaningful influence on the supreme leader. The Politburo was composed of the paramount leader and six others, one of whom was the premier, who would lead the government bureaucracy, and thereby act as a particularly important counterweight to the CCP chief. The premier, for example, was typically tasked with managing the day-to-day affairs of the economy. If the leader of the CCP proposed something seemingly rash for the economy, presumably the premier could rein it in before damage was done. To be clear, this was not an American-style division of labor between the legislative and the executive, but it was worth having in an autocracy.
Deng’s second reform was also through the Politburo, where he instituted a system of “term limits” on the rule of the paramount leader, limiting him to two consecutive terms of five years each. At the start of his second five-year term, the supreme leader would identify his successor from among the other members of the Politburo, so that in five years’ time the supreme leader would step down (having served a total of ten years) and this new supreme leader would be confirmed. Five years later, the second supreme leader’s successor would be identified, so that at the end of the second leader’s ten-year reign his successor would take over, and so on. This system of term limits worked during the leadership spans of each of Jiang Zemin (who actually served thirteen years), and Hu Jintao (who served exactly ten years). Deng was brilliant to construct such a system of peaceful transfer of power because he knew that not having one would create a serious weakness to the overall system. It was expected that Xi, as Hu’s successor, would continue with the same system.
Instead, Xi smashed this system of term limits to pieces. Xi came to power in November 2012. Five years later, at the then nineteenth CCP party congress (where the new Politburo is unveiled to the country), Xi did not appoint a designated successor to himself. Many people were shocked, but by then he had engineered a sufficient grip on the CCP that he could get away with this bold move. There was no surprise, then, that at the 20th Five Year Congress, in October 2022, Xi renewed his tenure for another five-year term. Moreover, he once again refused to designate a successor in October 2022, meaning that he will likely extend his personal leadership in the top spot for at least a fourth five-year period (i.e., 2027 to 2032). In addition, the new Politburo that Xi unveiled in October 2022 contained six new members that had only one feature in common—they were all staunch Xi loyalists from having worked for him in junior roles previously. In effect, Xi has accomplished precisely what Deng hoped to avoid. The current supreme leader of China, just like Mao, has ensconced himself for life on the autocrat’s throne surrounded by Politburo sycophants.
As for the direction Xi would take China, a document published by the CCP in 2013 makes clear that under Xi’s leadership the following will be the ideological orientation of China:
With his newfound power and infused with this CCP-centered ideology, since 2012 Xi has implemented a number of programs that have cemented his autocratic control over Chinese society. He has designed, developed, and deployed the world’s most comprehensive system of digital and biological surveillance of citizens.3 The system was perfected in Xinjiang Province, where facial recognition cameras (among other devices) loom over sidewalks at regular intervals and capture images of all citizens, neighborhood checkpoints take DNA samples of all residents, all phone calls are monitored in real time by gargantuan supercomputer centers, and “people of interest” (whose names are generated by the digital surveillance system) are regularly stopped on the street for questioning by police. Another version of this system involves a “social score” mechanism, where regular citizens all over China are given a starting number of points. They lose points if the surveillance system records them acting in an antisocial manner (such as spitting on the pavement), but they can also gain points if they do good deeds (helping an elderly person across the street). If they drop below a certain score, they are given a talking-to by the local authorities.
There is another variation on this system of intrusive hyper-surveillance for use in schools. With cameras in each classroom, students’ faces are tracked in real time to see if they are focusing on the subject matter being taught, or if they are daydreaming. Particular attention is paid when civics is taught, such as “Xi Jinping Thought,” the immortal teachings of the paramount leader. If the system finds a student is insufficiently engaged in the school environment, or not listening intently enough to CCP propaganda, then an in-person talking-to will follow, typically with the student’s parents also in attendance. George Orwell is rolling in his grave.
These astoundingly intrusive, some would say suffocating, social control systems had been predicted. Orwell wrote of such a dystopia in his classic book 1984. He used Soviet Russia as the inspiration for this book, but it took modern digital and biotech technologies, deployed today by China’s autocratic political system, which does not recognize personal human rights, to make it a reality. The “oppression technology stack” draws on artificial intelligence, high-performance semiconductor chips, cloud computing, supercomputers, telecommunications, Internet platforms, satellites, biotechnology, and soon quantum computers as well. That an autocratic government has combined this tech into a monstrous panopticon is one of the core drivers of dispute in Cold War 2.0, though the democracies have to be vigilant that their own governments and private sector companies don’t veer off into a similar world, especially driven by commercial imperatives.4
Another program of oppression in China involves the Xi government’s complete control of the information space. Beijing has instituted a “Great Firewall of China,” by which the government blocks the entry into China of a number of social media and related services that emanate from the democracies. Google and Facebook, for example, cannot be accessed by the typical Chinese citizen; their smartphone or personal computer won’t be able to breach the technological firewall that Xi has built in China. This is one of the first “technological decouplings” between the autocracies and the democracies, and it is noteworthy that it was first instituted by the autocrat in Beijing. This book certainly looks at some programs where the democracies are pressing the technology-decoupling agenda, but to be clear-eyed about Cold War 2.0, so is China. The fundamental difference, of course, is that the democracies are implementing the policy of technology decoupling to help protect their democracies and to enhance the freedoms of Chinese citizens, while the Chinese are doing it to further remove personal freedoms from its citizens. As well, the scope for this digital oppression technology is not merely China, as Chinese tech companies have sold variations of this digital oppression system to sixty autocrats all over the world. This is another axis along the rift of international technology decoupling. To be clear, the democracies use surveillance technologies as well, but not nearly to the same extent, and, most important, they do so under rules intended to respect and promote human rights—though strengthening these norms in the democracies can always use improvement, and the enforcement of these rules when they are violated is a continual work in progress.
China also devotes massive resources to censoring information within China. It is estimated that the Chinese state employs about 100,000 people as Internet censors.5 This is a large number of people entirely devoted to checking email and text messages, blog posts, and other forms of content, simply to see if their words mention politics, or in any way are critical of the supreme leader and the hundreds of other topics that engage the censors in their task of oppression management. Equally, these extensive censorship practices have been woven into the rules governing AI applications. This is why if you ask a Chinese AI-driven search engine a question about politics, it will fail to answer—it simply returns a blank screen. This type of political restriction makes it harder to develop AI in China than in the democracies, though AI programs in the US will also filter out certain questions (i.e., “How do I make a bomb from simple parts?”), but not nearly as many as in China.
There are other ways that Xi’s regime, for autocratic political purposes, has made life more difficult for companies and entrepreneurs in China’s technology sector. The most successful tech entrepreneur in China, Jack Ma, spoke out at a conference in October 2020 about how Chinese financial regulation wasn’t keeping up with trends in Chinese fintech. A few days later Mr. Ma disappeared, and he wasn’t seen again for two years, although he surfaced again in China in the spring of 2023 after reportedly “teaching” in Japan. During this same period many other tech companies were told by the CCP to curb certain behaviors, and to toe the party line on “common prosperity” and other CCP goals. Xi was sending a clear message that no company or industry group or other entity or organization in China could or should challenge the supremacy of the CCP or Xi’s own personal leadership position. In addition, Xi reinvigorated the practice that every company must have a CCP “cell” that is coequal with the CEO and senior management of the company, and that major decisions of the management group have to be vetted by the CCP cell. Again, the point is to ensure that no entity in civil society can act on its own; all legitimacy in China flows from the CCP. This is modern autocracy with Chinese characteristics.
In light of these oppressive practices against its own citizens, for forty years the democracies have tried to use the influence of their economic relationship with China to get Beijing to liberalize its political system, and in particular to grant more freedom to its citizens. After four decades of trying, it is now fairly clear that the strategy of using economic integration to achieve these political ends has failed. Commercial engagement has not led to an inexorable meeting of the minds on the political front. Moreover, irony of ironies, today it is actually China that leverages the close degree of economic integration between itself and numerous democracies—to China’s distinct advantage. Below is a list of cases where China has used economic coercion against a democracy:
Again, when some commentators urge the democracies not to begin taking actions that would decouple the democracies from China, it is important to remember these cases, where it was China, not the impacted democracy, that began the practice of decoupling. In Cold War 2.0 there are many situations where pots are calling kettles black.
Six months after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, Russia had its first parliamentary elections, which were relatively fair and free. The following year, in 1990, Russians went to the polls and elected Boris Yeltsin their new president. It seemed like glasnost was paying off, and democracy was finally coming to Russia. Still, the autocratic vultures started circling during the same decade. In 1991, in reaction to the departure of the East Bloc countries and the implosion of the Soviet Union itself (fifteen autonomous republics, including Ukraine, finally truly became autonomous), some disgruntled ex-communists with the assistance of leaders of the KGB, Russia’s state security police, staged a coup attempt. To his credit, Yeltsin stood firm and the coup plotters soon capitulated and were arrested. Nevertheless, a sense of unease about democracy had entered the collective psyche of the country with the world’s largest landmass and most nuclear weapons.
Fueling the discomfort with democracy was a Russian economy in free-fall. Try as he might, Yeltsin was unable to make the fiendishly difficult shift from the autocratic/command economy to open market economy fast enough. And when, toward the end of the decade, the switch had been made, it turned out that about eighty so-called oligarchs had bought the shares or assets of the largest industrial companies in Russia for bargain-basement prices. In short, Russia’s period of democracy, the 1990s, left most Russians with a very bad taste in their mouths. Democracy would never recover.
When in 1999 Yeltsin decided to leave politics, largely for health reasons, for some reason that has still not been explained very well, he endorsed Vladimir Putin as his successor. The most plausible explanation is that Putin, who was head of the FSB (the state security police), was a “pair of safe hands,” who would run a steady ship, and likely wouldn’t come after Yeltsin for any transgressions committed during his time in the Kremlin. In any event, Putin was elected president of Russia on March 26, 2000, in a fairly free and fair election (but already with clear signs of state television favoring Putin). Putin received 53 percent of the vote, and the next two candidates received 29 percent and 5 percent, respectively.
Putin wasted no time bringing autocracy back to Russia after he was elected president. During the election campaign Putin was satirized by NTV in an ongoing political commentary show called Puppets. It was biting satire, not dissimilar to what a viewer would see on America’s Saturday Night Live, or especially Britain’s Spitting Image—a British comedy show that used puppets to caricature politicians, royals, and celebrities that was the inspiration for Puppets. In mature democracies politicians know that political satire comes with the territory; in the US some politicians are even good enough sports to appear as guests on Saturday Night Live. It’s all part of the dialogue between the citizens and their elected representatives in a stable, sensible democracy.
Putin’s reaction to the Russian Puppets show that lampooned him was very different, and it ominously foreshadowed his general approach to democracy. Literally two days after the election, Putin had the FSB state security police (where he had just been the boss before being elected president) raid the offices of NTV. The FSB confiscated NTV’s computers, allegedly as evidence of some wrongdoing. A few weeks later trumped-up criminal charges were brought against Vladimir Gusinsky, the owner of NTV. Eventually, Gusinsky was persuaded to leave Russia, and to this day he lives in exile. This incident heralded the return of autocracy to Russia. The experiment with democracy, between 1985 and 1999, did not survive the departure of Gorbachev and Yeltsin from the political scene. Putin’s tenure in democracy lasted all of forty-eight hours.
In the 2004 election, Putin’s autocratic tactics started to pay large dividends, especially courtesy of his complete control of state television, which is how most people in Russia received their news. In that election Putin received 72 percent of the vote, and his nearest rival got 14 percent. To give Putin his due, he was also very astute to increase pensions 30 percent in the few years immediately after taking office in 2000. While he and his oligarch cronies were ransacking Russia financially, he was willing to share some of that enormous wealth with average people. As an autocrat for life, he knew he had a long tenure before him, and so he chose not to embezzle every last ruble right away; he knew he would do better financially if he spread his embezzlement out over many years. Longtime investor in Russia William Browder (and staunch critic of Putin) pegged his net worth at $200 billion in 2017,6 an astounding number considering his official state salary as president was only $130,000 a year.
In 2008 Putin orchestrated a classic autocratic sleight of hand. Term limit laws prevented him from running for president a third consecutive time, so he handpicked Dmitry Medvedev to run for president. Medvedev received 71 percent of the vote for the position of president (again, courtesy of very unequal media coverage by state-owned television outlets) and he immediately appointed Putin prime minister. In 2012, Putin was back as a candidate for president, and he won 63 percent of the vote. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the independent group that monitored the election, found that there was no real competition in the election, and Putin’s victory was assured from the beginning of the process (which included, as always, grossly unfair coverage in state-owned media, as well as material voting fraud on election day).
Putin got 78 percent of the vote in the 2018 election (extended to six years from four through another Putin move to autocracy). The most viable anti-Putin candidate, Alexei Navalny, was not allowed to stand for election. Also, several political parties in the Duma that could run candidates without having to collect signatures did not do so, instead announcing they would support Putin. The European Union found that fraud riddled the election; estimates of millions of illegal ballots were documented, including on webcams.
Some apologists for Putin in the democracies have argued that this Russian type of election under Putin is simply a variation of democracy, which they have variously dubbed as “sovereign democracy,” “managed democracy,” or even, as one commentator in the US has called it, “illiberal democracy.” These hybrid terms make no sense and are dangerous, given that words matter in Cold War 2.0. A democracy cannot be qualified with these adjectives. A country is, politically speaking, either a democracy or it is not a democracy, and Putin’s Russia is not. What Putin has done is destroy any meaningful alternative locus of political power in Russia beyond himself.7 He runs the show completely. He has built a personality cult around himself. He increasingly venerates Stalin, one of the top three bloodiest autocrats from the 20th century. If you need to label Putin’s perversion of democracy in Russia, you can refer to it as “autocratic capitalism,” but it should not be called any kind of democracy.
Beyond his disdain for free, fair, and credible elections, Putin has utter contempt for human rights and freedom of the press. The high-water mark for Putin’s absolute impunity within Russia on this score was the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya in the lobby of her apartment building in 2006. Some years later Boris Nemtsov was also assassinated for investigating corruption in the Putin regime. Putin also encouraged the Duma, Russia’s semi-elected body of representatives, to implement anti-LGBT legislation. Putin regularly arrests, and poisons with nerve agents, opponents of the regime, including in April 2022 a forty-one-year-old father of three, opposition politician Alexei Navalny. He was treated in Germany for the poisoning, and when he returned to Russia he was literally taken from the airport straight to prison, where he now languishes in a tiny cell having received a thirty-year sentence for fictitious crimes.
After invading Ukraine, Putin passed yet more laws driving Russia into a dark, totalitarian version of autocracy. Putin has made it illegal to call the full-scale war that he started in Ukraine a “war”; instead, by law, it is a “special military operation” (again, Orwell is rolling in his grave). Hundreds have been imprisoned for speaking against the war, even if only to a family member in a restaurant. Vladimir Kara-Murza, a member of the Duma who is a long-standing critic of the Putin regime, received a twenty-five-year prison sentence for speaking out publicly against the war in Ukraine.8 Putin’s other favorite tactic is to label opponents “agents of foreign states.” Russian citizens with this moniker often have to find a new life in exile outside of Russia, thereby seemingly justifying the Putin label in the first place—it’s another classic autocratic trick. It is not a surprise that in 2017 Freedom House gave Russia a global score of 20 out of 100; in 2022 this score had fallen to a miserable 16 out of 100. Other countries ranked around Russia include Angola, Chad, China, Burundi, Cuba, Gambia, Iran, the UAE, and Vietnam. This is as low and authoritarian as Russia has fallen under Putin. For context, here are the scores of some other countries in 2017: Sweden, Finland, and Norway each rank 100; Canada and the Netherlands, 99; Denmark, 97; Japan, 96; Germany, 95; Chile, 94, and Costa Rica, 91—each of them democracies.
As Putin turned increasingly autocratic he went about reassembling the old Soviet Russian Empire. When countries like Britain and France lost their empires after World War II, they found other roles in the world (Britain as America’s junior partner, and France as a co-builder with Germany of a united Europe). Russia, by contrast, has never reconciled itself to the Berlin Wall being torn down in 1989, the unification of the two Germanys soon thereafter, and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. In a fit of autocratic (and very dangerous) nostalgia, Putin wants to rebuild the Russian Empire. In doing so he has been very muscular in breaching the rules-based international order, including the paramount rule (as enshrined in the charter of the United Nations) that no state shall violate the territorial sovereignty of another state. And after he invades a country, he has his soldiers inflict incredible human suffering on civilians, committing a range of war crimes, and even more grave crimes against humanity. In Ukraine he has been committing ethnic cleansing, including genocide. In 1999, Russia invaded Chechnya. Putin ordered his superior forces to absolutely level the capital, Grozny; even he choked up when he toured the devastated city soon after the sadistic Russian bombing. In a similar vein, in 2008 Russia invaded Georgia. Later there would be major Russian military operations in Libya and Syria, where he kept the bloody autocrat of Damascus, Bashar al-Assad, in power. (Assad has killed an estimated 500,000 of his own citizens.) Putin’s Russia, while a huge landmass, only has 147 million people, and an economy the size of South Korea. Yet Russia punches above its weight in military matters because, frankly, Putin enjoys punching so much, and he does not concern himself with the large loss of life his military actions foist on civilians.
In 2014 Russia invaded and annexed Crimea (previously part of Ukraine) and dropped “semi-flagged” Russian military personnel into the two eastern provinces of Ukraine (the Donbas) to spur the secession of the Donbas from Ukraine. In 2014 Ukraine was not a member of NATO, and so NATO did not respond militarily to assist Ukraine in fighting Russian troops directly. Nevertheless, NATO countries did send trainers into Ukraine between 2014 and 2022 to help Ukraine build its own capacity to fend off the Russians aggressors. A number of NATO countries also supplied Ukraine with weapons and munitions commencing in 2014, supply arrangements that continue to this day. Eight years later Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Cold War 2.0, though, began with the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. This was also the final nail in the coffin of democracy in Russia. Russia can have either a democracy or an empire—it cannot have both, and certainly now with Putin’s pursuit of empire through the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia certainly can have no democracy (at least while Putin reigns in the Kremlin).
Chapter 2 discussed how Russia stole copious amounts of intellectual property from the United States, initially to build Russia’s atomic bomb. The practice continued for several other weapons systems, and then relative to civilian projects such as large commercial aircraft, jet engines, and computer software (lots and lots of computer software). In the case of the British Nene jet engine, the Russians were allowed to use it only in commercial aircraft, but they promptly put it into military jets as well, which caused considerable difficulty for the US, the UK, and their allies in the Korean War. This habit was then picked up by the Chinese autocrats as well. Add to computer software cultural products such as music, videos, and films. One practice that greatly troubled businessmen in the democracies was the requirement that in order to be given access to Chinese markets, the foreign business had to license its technology to a Chinese partner on very favorable terms. Both under cover of these licenses, and otherwise, there was the growing problem of Chinese companies stealing these technological assets from the democracies.
Faced with these serious challenges to doing business with the Chinese, in the 1990s the business community in the democracies, and their political allies, presented to China the huge incentive discussed above—membership in the World Trade Organization if China curtailed its most egregious commercial practices, such as intellectual property theft. Within a decade of China’s entry into the WTO, however, it became clear that China had no intention of directing its companies to stop stealing intellectual property from the democracies. Product designs, software, and cultural products such as music recordings and films all were being “ripped off” (to use the vernacular) by Chinese entities without any financial compensation. A great deal of technology that China was using to become more competitive on the global market in fact originated in university and company technology labs in the democracies. This problem has never gone away, and persists to this day. Moreover, when the Internet was adopted by business the world over, Chinese and Russian hackers (condoned, encouraged, and sheltered by the Chinese and Russian governments), became expert in stealing intellectual property from the democracies by using online methods.
Soon after the commercial Internet blossomed in the 2000s, computer hacking by Chinese and especially Russian actors expanded beyond IP theft into several other nefarious practices. These all came to constitute major flashpoints in the relationship between the democracies and the autocracies. It is axiomatic that for a war to be “cold,” there cannot be direct kinetic military conflict between the two leading contrary protagonists. A cold war turns hot when bombs are dropped, missiles are fired, people begin to be killed, and buildings and other hard assets start to blow up in the physical world. In the current digital era, though, there are operations that, while not exactly hot, aren’t quite cold either. These can be called “near war” or “hybrid” actions, and the Chinese and the Russians quickly became experts at them as soon as computers, and later the Internet, experienced widespread growth around the world.
Particularly as the Internet developed into a ubiquitous form of global electronic communication, China and Russia employed the Internet to “hack” websites operated by democracies. At first this activity was merely annoying, but it quickly escalated into dangerous behavior as the hackers—sponsored and paid by the Chinese and Russian governments—grew more expert, bolder, and more successful in terms of what they could accomplish inside the computers they hacked that were in the possession of governments, businesses, research universities, and other institutions in the democracies. Sometimes the hackers’ objective was to steal money, trade secrets, or personal data, but over time their techniques expanded to include inflicting damage that actually caused direct, physical consequences.
Consider the now infamous 2021 DarkSide ransomware cyberattack against Colonial Pipeline, a company that operates the longest oil pipeline in the US—5,500 miles from Texas to New York. Over 12,000 gas stations rely on Colonial for their wholesale gas. DarkSide is a Russia-based Internet hacking group that the Russian government permits to operate in Russia so long as it targets only non-Russian victims. On May 7, 2021, hackers from DarkSide penetrated the computers of Colonial Pipeline and inserted malware software into its systems. Colonial had to shut down its computers for six days, which then brought pipeline operations to a sudden halt. This in turn caused shortages at hundreds of gas stations in the days that followed, which had ripple effects for consumers who could not drive to work or take alternative transportation. The price of gas also spiked in the states impacted by the outage. The incident only ended when Colonial Pipeline paid a $4.4 million ransom (of which the FBI was able to recover $2.3 million).9
Another form of hacking involves Russian and Chinese interference in the election and related processes of democracies. The 2019 Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election (Mueller report), for example, outlines in great detail the “sweeping and systematic” interference by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian organization backed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, in the 2016 US presidential elections.10 Prigozhin, who at the time was very close to Russian president Vladimir Putin, was a criminal who served nine years in jail for assault, and then he became Putin’s personal caterer. Later Prigozhin became the principal behind the Wagner Group, a mercenary army fighting on behalf of the Russian government in Ukraine and in many other nations, especially in the Global South, before he led an insurrection against Moscow in June 2023. These social media influence activities, analyzed in the Mueller report, were undertaken by Prigozhin’s group of IRA hackers and Internet trolls, starting in 2014 and included the following: their Facebook and Instagram accounts reached about 126 million Americans; roughly 3,800 Twitter accounts reached about 1.4 million Americans; and some of these Twitter accounts achieved tens of thousands of followers, including some US politicians who retweeted IRA material.
The core objectives of this social media campaign by the Russian IRA was to influence users of American social media services such as Twitter and Facebook in ways that would “provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States.”11 For example, Prigozhin’s IRA would open US-based social media accounts, and then pose as Black Lives Matter protesters, Tea Party activists, or anti-immigration groups, posting controversial statements that would generate political division and social conflict. They also posted biting criticism of Hillary Clinton, all with a view to influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. (Putin was worried about Clinton getting elected, as she was on record as ready to take a much tougher stand against Putin and Russia’s various nefarious activities against the democracies than the Republican candidate, Donald Trump.)
In addition to the social media interference campaigns run by the Russian “Internet trolls” (expert operatives hired and paid by the Russian government who post incendiary material on the Internet for financial gain), the Main Intelligence Directorate of the general staff of the Russian Army (the GRU) also hacked their way into the computers of the Democratic National Committee—the organizing body of one of the two major American political parties—stole hundreds of thousands of documents, and released a subset of these materials into the public domain, all with a view to damaging the campaign of the 2016 Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton. While the social media interference campaign and the hacking of documents, constitute criminal offenses in the United States, going after the criminals in Russia presents some very difficult hurdles. In December 2016, the US government imposed sanctions on Russia in response to Moscow having interfered with the election held the month before. Of course this was too little, too late to prevent the harm caused by these social media campaigns and computer hacking attacks.
China and Russia complain daily that they neither like nor accept the “rules-based international order.” This should come as no surprise, because just as autocrats fail to see the value in the “rule of law” domestically in their own countries, so they have no patience for similar rules applying to the international relations between states. This begs the important question—if not a rules-based order for global affairs, then what?
China has answered this question very tellingly in its approach to the dispute engulfing the South China Sea (SCS). The SCS is a massive body of water that lies off the coast of China (as its name suggests), but also the coasts of a number of other countries, including Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam. (For example, the Philippines calls the portion of the SCS that lies off its coast the “West Philippines Sea.” Often in international relations the view held by a government official depends on where he or she sits.) The SCS is an important body of water. About $4 trillion of international trade is carried by ships traversing the SCS each year. China, the world’s largest oil importing country, received about 80 percent of its oil by tankers coming to China over the SCS. There is also likely a great deal of fossil fuels and minerals on and under the seabed in various areas of the SCS.
There is a major dispute among the countries with coasts along the SCS as to how to draw its maritime boundaries (i.e., each country’s 12-mile territorial sea boundary as well as each country’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone). The conflict exists because the states bordering the SCS (other than China) want the various boundary and other claims settled in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). By contrast, China wants to settle the dispute by having the other states simply accept its so-called nine-dash line boundary in the SCS. This nine-dash line gives China the vast majority—about 90 percent—of the SCS (see map of contesting delimitations in the images section, where the nine-dash line is drawn in red).
To drive home its position, and given that especially in international affairs it is often that “possession is nine-tenths of the law,” around 2014 China began building docks and permanent buildings on a number of the SCS island atolls. On one such small location, aptly named Mischief Reef, the Chinese built an island large enough to accommodate a runway for military aircraft and an area to station missile defense weapons. In effect, China has been changing the “facts on the ground” (or more precisely, making ground-based facts in the water) in order to bolster its maximalist territorial claims to the SCS. In a similar vein, China gave rifles and other small arms to Chinese fishermen who work in the SCS, ordering them to harass the fishermen of other countries that they encounter there, even though China has no internationally accepted right to the territorial waters where it promotes such harassment.
China’s nine-dash line has been rejected by most members of the international community, especially the other littoral countries bordering the SCS. It is considered such a massive overreach of jurisdiction that these other countries deemed some action to be essential. To counter China’s position, the Philippines (one of the countries that has a great deal to lose from the massively expansionist position on the SCS taken by China) brought a legal case (under international law) against China in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, in the Netherlands in 2013. The Philippines was backed up by several other countries, who all prepared and submitted supporting briefs to the court. On July 12, 2016, the court released its lengthy (479-page) judgment.12 While the court did not draw the actual maritime boundaries that would be consistent with UNCLOS principles and previous court decisions, it did find that the UNCLOS principles should determine the rights of the countries and that the Chinese nine-dash line is illegal as it exceeds the delimitation provided by the UNCLOS rules. In short, the court decided that China cannot draw boundaries wherever China wishes; rather, China must follow the rules of international law. (By the way, China helped negotiate, and then agreed to, the UNCLOS rules back in the 1980s.) Those in the world community who are adherents of the rule of law (in this case international law) unanimously agreed with the decision of the court that China’s nine-dash line was an egregious affront to the world’s rules-based international order.
China, for its part, immediately denounced the decision of the court, and did not even participate in the hearings there, although it was invited to do so. Essentially, China’s nine-dash line, and its contempt for international law in resolving this major dispute, shows the disdain in which Beijing holds the “rules-based international order.” Xi Jinping has decided that China’s territorial sovereignty and marine rights in the SCS will not be determined by legal rules as required by the court’s decision. In effect, Beijing has laid down an important marker: if the international legal system holds back China from achieving its own objectives, then China is dead set against that system of norms used by the rest of the world to order their international relations.
This case illustrates perfectly, and clearly, what China wants when it says it requires a new conception of international affairs where the system of rules promulgated by institutions like the United Nations no longer apply to China (or Russia, or other major powers). This is the essence of the dispute at the heart of Cold War 2.0. For so long as China (and Russia in its equally “might is right” approach to Ukraine) continue to act with impunity on the global stage, Cold War 2.0 will be a struggle where the democracies push back against such dangerous behavior by the autocracies.
Put most starkly, China has told the world in no uncertain terms that it believes in a global model of geopolitics where “might is right” and where smaller states must defer to China simply because China is bigger, more populous, and more powerful. The nine-dash line is a perfect example of China’s approach to international affairs. China is by far the largest country bordering the SCS, therefore China’s nine-dash line must be accepted by the smaller states. This is an astounding approach to global diplomacy in the 21st century; indeed, China’s position is that there actually is no need for diplomacy, because whatever the large autocracy says, goes. Smaller states, well, they’ll just have to grin and bear it.
The world has seen this movie before, because prior to the end of World War II “might is right” was the prevailing approach to international relations. As early as 2,500 years ago, Thucydides, one of the founders of modern history writing (one of the first to say that beyond describing the facts, a historian also had to understand and explain the motivations of the protagonists of historical events), described a scene in ancient Greece where the Athenians meted out punishment to Megara, another Greek city-state that had crossed Athens. The Athenian army ransacked Megara, killed all the men, and took all the women and children into captivity. It was exceptionally harsh treatment, given that Megara’s transgression was not that grave, but Athens wanted to set an example for other members of the Delian League, the alliance system of about 300 Greek city-states run by Athens. Thucydides described in some detail the brutal behavior of the Athenians, the massive bloodshed, and then writes the famous line: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”13 This is a perceptive description of the autocratic mentality, even though it was wielded in this case by Athens, at the time a democracy.
Thucydides sets out the central challenge posed by Cold War 2.0: How should the democracies respond to a pair of large autocracies who refuse to behave in accordance with the rules-based international order? The answer is partially lodged in Thucydides’s text, when he quotes (just before the sentence excerpted above) the Athenians admitting that the strong lording it over the weak in any way they wish doesn’t apply to states of the same strength. Rather, where you have states of “equal power,” instead of always fighting they will often discuss and settle issues peacefully based on what is “legally right,” rather than solely on military might. This insight should be one of the central principles animating democracies today. The best way for them to confront the Chinese and Russian autocracies is to ensure that the democracies band together and approach the autocrats as a collective alliance of democracies.